A Sicilian Sausage Bread Goes by Many Names

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha.

Yes.

This is Alice from North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

I come from an Irish Catholic family, and I married a Sicilian man. He’s American, but he’s of Sicilian heritage. And we’ve been together a long time, and his family has always had the Christmas tradition of making binalots. And it’s like a sausage bread. And I have researched this term, and I’ve asked everybody in his family. Nobody seems to know where the word binalata comes from. So that is one kind of unusual word that I’m curious about.

I think what you’ve got there is an American version of a dialect word of a well-known Sicilian food item. And the reason I say well-known is because there are seasonal celebrations, some in August and some around Christmas and some for Saints Day that feature this particular food item.

Now, I think so. You’re going to have to describe me what’s in this. What goes into it? What is it like?

It’s almost like a pizza dough with sausage, cooked sausage, and cheese, and onions, and olives, olive oil on the dough. And then it’s rolled up kind of like into a little, kind of like a Pillsbury crescent roll, and popped in the oven, and they’re delicious.

Okay, that’s it.

I think we’re on the same track. This is known as an imbrillata, I-M-B-R-I-U-L-A-T-A. And what you’re giving me is basically a transformation of that word. The word has undergone numerous transformations. Already, usually in Italian, they drop the I off at the beginning, so it’s known as an imbrillata. It’s just spelled M-B-R-I-U-L-A-T-A. And it’s also known as a minolata, miscata, miscata, amiscata, pinolata.

That makes sense. Pinolati, briolate, other things. And it’s exactly like you describe it. It is dough, a lot like pizza dough. It is rolled out. You fill it with either sausage or bacon or minced pork, brown, maybe in a white wine. There’s also a sauteed filling of onion and garlic, olives, maybe black olives, some herbs, possibly dill or fennel. And then you fill it in there. And there’s a couple where you can either do it like you said. You roll them individually like maybe a crescent roll. Or you can spread it out like one big rectangle and cover the whole thing with this filling. And then roll it from a corner like you might roll a cloth napkin. And then form a giant circle like a wreath and pinch the ends together and bake it whole like a giant bread wreath. And then when it’s nice and brown, obviously you put olive oil during the whole process, you cut it into segments. And so each one of these segments looks, you know, the cross section has a nice rolled spiral effect. And that gives you the embulata.

Oh, you are an angel. You’re an angel. And this has given me so many great ideas for the Christmas time. And I’m going to be the genius, the star of the family. There’s a version with potatoes, diced, pre-cooked potatoes. You can do cheeses, like a dry one, like a pecorino or a melting cheese. And these come from parts of Sicily, particularly Milena. That’s where they have, every August, they have a celebration. Specifically, this food dish, the Imbulata. And as far as the origin of the word, it is believed, and I say it is, I’m using the passive intentionally. It is believed that the word comes ultimately from a Greek word embryon. You can hear something there that means enclosed within a casing. Because the fillings are enclosed within this bread casing. Which I would think embryo and yeah, that makes sense. That makes perfect sense.

Yeah. I am so grateful to you, too, and I love your show, and I love learning all these new words and where they come from. So thank you so very much, and you’ve given me some great ideas for Christmas.

Alice, I’m going to give you that spelling one more time so you can Google it, and you’re going to get a bunch of pages in Italian to translate them with Google or Bing or whatever, and you’ll get some great recipes. The spelling again is M-B-R-I-U-L-A-T-A.

Okay.

All right, Alice, thank you so much. Good luck. Have fun at Christmas, all right? And thank you so much. I really appreciate it, and I love your show. Keep up the good work.

All right.

Take care now.

Thanks, Alice. Give our best to your family.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

By the way, if you ever want to hear Martha and I talk about food and language, we make guest appearances on Chris Kimball’s Milk Street. Just go to the Milk Street website and search for Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and you’ll find a lot of our special segments.